KISS!

The doors exhale as they open in front of me. The bus is here. It is a huge, empty rolling machine here to scoop up me and me alone.
It is very, very late.
It is a cool, crisp night. The lights of the city are stoic, waiting. Those still shuffling about are doing so by the power of drugs or acute insomnia. Vampires and throat-cutters are still awake. The sun is napping, blackness reigns.
I step on the bus. I open my wallet to where she can see a snapshot of my nephew Kaleb and my monthly pass. The driver nods. She has meandering eyes and dark acne scattered along her wide face. She must wonder to what crack house I am traveling to. She sits bent in her seat, her stomach leaking over her belt, judging me. Most likely she is trying to gauge if I'm old enough to prostitute myself, if I'm a speed freak or a meth head.
I sit alone near a window. The bus moves on cycle by cycle making no stops. Only phantoms are out right now. Only the soulless are still up.
I'm still shaking. My fingers are trembling, the muscles in my face are twitching. I am fifteen at the time. I have birthed a demon I will never quite digest.
I should have brought a jacket or at least a long-sleeve. The wind outside is a slow, deliberate whip. The night is breathing like an asthmatic.
The driver has her eyes to the road. She slows at every stop in case another teenager has hastily run away from his grandma's house in the middle of the night and is trying desperately to get to the other side of town. There seems to be no one else who is going to try on knock on his best friend's door well past the witching hour and ask to stay the night. Looks like there is a lack of rail-thin adolescents who just fractured their grandfather's skull.
The bus stops. The doors open slow. I half expect a zombie to come aboard, a grave digger, a half-owl, half-human, an echo. Instead it is a man with a sputtering beard, and long, greasy hair that drapes down over his eyes. He drops a thousand clinking coins in the machine and waits. The driver gives him a paper transfer. Rather than saying thank you, he prefers to keep his eyes down and waddle on in.
I am watching my city in a semi-blur. The underbelly of where I live is showing me all its warts and sores. Only the undead are not yet asleep. I see the strip malls in dim light dressed in bars and barricades. I see men boring into garbage. I see souls ravaged by a needle, by a pipe, leaving a discarded corpse to line the gutter. The only other passenger on this giant thing and he sits rights next to me. His body stifles my space. He is rocking back and forth in his seat.
"Kiss is the greatest rock band of all-time."
I don't realize at first that he is talking to me. I got accustomed to hearing only the engine rattle. Plus he's not looking at me, he is rocking violently now and his eyes are pointing somewhere near the emergency exit.
"You think so?"
He rocks harder. "Kiss is the greatest."
I don't want to tell him that I think they suck, that their songs are average and their spectacle unimpressive. I consider theorizing that if I grew up with them I would have a more tender place in my heart for them, that they wouldn't be just clowns but heroes to my angsty, rebellious side.
"What about AC/DC?"
He rocks faster, close to unhinging his hip. "No! Kiss is the greatest!"
"Okay, man."
I leave it alone. I notice his shirt has the members of Kiss on it. He is also clawing a hold of a CD player that pushes 'Detroit Rock City' into his ears. I don't think he's willing to debate.
I also don't care. I am drowning internally. Guilt has a stranglehold around my insides. I'm trying to clear my mind, to breathe easy. But my temples are caving in. I close my eyes and I see my sister's haunted face. I hear her innocence being pierced and it bleeds out through her sobbing eyes. I am tensing up, my stomach vomiting up my stomach again and again.
"I'm glad that they started wearing the make-up again. It just wasn't the same."
He is rocking as he says this, which I can only assume is about his favorite band.
"Great, that's just great," I tell him, spreading a thick layer of sarcasm on top.
"My favorite song is 'Love Gun.' That's an awesome song. You know why I love it?"
I turn away. I'm trying to wrestle my conscious and he's buzzing in my ear like a sloppy, fat fly. I'm trying to ignore this fool, but he persists.
"You know why? Because it was the song that was playing when I lost my virginity. That's why. Awesome. Kiss...yeah."
He rocks in his seat. He smiles satisfied, likely nostalgic for when some drunk girl took his cherry and for the Kiss-heavy soundtrack that accompanied that moment. He starts talking about some other song that Kiss wrote and changed his life. He is babbling about some concert he went to that altered his whole existence, some brief meeting with a band member that forever touched his pathetic being, blah, blah, blah.
I want to tell him to shut up. I want to hold his swinging torso still and tie him down. I want to burn all his damned CDs and records and posters and autographed handkerchiefs and force him to listen to and obsess about something else. I want to tell him that I am a monster. He should know that he is sitting next to a boy who may have just killed his own grandfather. He should be informed that my hands are dripping with blood of my bloodline. He should know that I feel both victorious and ashamed, that I have both committed a crime and demonstrated heroism.
My sister's mouth was covered with his hands. They were wrinkled and spotted, the skin thin and nearly transparent. I was only awake because I had been disturbed by a dream and was trying to walk it off through the halls. A whimper brought me to investigate my sister's room.
I expected to find her twisting in her sheets, pained by a nightmare similar to my own. I thought I would sit next to her and kiss her forehead, pat her softly and ease her into more gentle sleep. Then I would return to the room where I sleep in my grandparents' house and close my eyes until the morning. When I did open the door, there was an animal atop her. There was a debase beast stealing her purity under the cover of night. A fever of rage erupted in my face, my muscles all wound to where I could not move. The jackal looked up at me. The father of my father gazed at me with empty eyes. He was a thief caught, a parasite revealed, a traitor exposed.
I could feel the pain he handed my sister like ice picks being jammed into my spinal column. I was crushed by the weight of it all. I thought how long this may of gone on and I nearly collapsed.
I charged at him, not knowing what I would do once I reached him. I instinctively reached for him and at first only caught his thinning hair. I locked my hands on the gray, matty stuff and pulled out a fistful. He stumbled backwards and I attacked him. He was not my grand pappy when I slammed him viciously into the bookshelf. He was not kin to me when I kneed him in the sternum. When I choked his flabby throat, when I dug my claws into his terrified face, when I devoured him, he was not my family. I was in a frenzy, unaware of time and pain and morality. I was drenching the floorboards with tears, I was shivering, I was a wretched savage grinding bones of my own lineage.
I smashed his head against a doorframe and he ceased to move. Something broke, something shattered and it echoed in the quiet house and still does between my ears. He fell with his neck twisted awkwardly. He would never touch my sister again. He was a corpse. I was not sure of that at the time. I ran before the paramedics came and discovered that his skull was in several pieces. I was a fugitive when they had a lovely service for him. A beloved husband, diligent father, and charismatic foreman received a quaint send-off. His elegy did not contain years of sexual abuse that forever scarred his grandchildren. There was not a mention of his predatory nature, tearing off panties during secret conquests, showing the gun that would be used on those who told, of his unseen transformation from man to hellish fiend. They showed a slide-show of photos, not one of which was of my sister or my cousins crying into a thinning pillow, nor did they have one of a bloody vagina, a broken spirit or a concrete fear of intimacy.
Everyone’s jaw was shut. Discussing such atrocities would forever stain the clean air that we breathed. Unsheathing that snake would force us all to swallow a bit of poison. It would not be something we could laugh off or forget, it would be a hard, eternal nail goring into our chests. Instead we forced the victims to stand alone. The misery is theirs and theirs alone. That turmoil is locked under their ribcage and they will never get their hands on the key to set it free. We refuse to give it to them. We are monsters.
"Who's your favorite Kiss member? Mine's Peter Criss."
He startles me. I was somewhere else, somewhere darker. He has wrapped his mind tight around a speck and reaps the blissful ignorance. I am trapped between regret and triumph.
"None. I don't care about Kiss."
He can only react by rocking harder. He seems to be taking the name of his favorite kind of music too literally. He seems to be close to going into a seizure. He seems to have no idea that he is pestering a murderer, that his seat-mate is guilty of patricide.
The bus stops. Who'll get on now? Is a chimera trying to get downtown? Is a rapist heading to his graveyard shift? A ghoul? A crack baby? The doors open and no one enters. Must be Stalin's ghost, I think to myself.
The driver turns around at us. She buries her hands under her spare tires in order to get to her hips.
"If y'all don't mind, I'm going to stop in at Jack-in-the-Box and grab some food. I'll be right back."
She steps off the bus. I peer out the window blankly. I'm tired, worn, emptied. The glass is fogging up. It's getting colder out there.
I feel the ultimate Kiss fan move behind me. I glance back, expecting to see him swaying again. But he is no longer in the seat. He is walking toward the front of the bus. Maybe he can't wait, maybe he really has to get to whatever mundane, nondescript destination he has in mind. I watch him sit in the driver's seat.
"What are you doing?"
He's fiddling with the buttons and switches that surround the steering wheel. He finds the lever that closes the door and pulls it. The doors gasp as they shut. Before I can react, the bus has started. The Kiss fanatic is pressing on the gas and the big, hollow bus is off.
The driver steps out of the Jack-in-the-Box just in time to see us drive away. She drops her food. The burgers splat against her shoes and a chocolate shake bounces on the curb before hugging her Dickies. Her mouth falls open and her eyes wiggle in her head. Nothing she can do.
Suddenly I'm afraid. This guy is wobbling the bus in the middle of two lanes. He is rocking back and forth, nearly head-butting the windshield every time. He is driving way too fast. He is mumbling some bullshit about Kiss.
"Kiss is the greatest rock band of all-time!"
We are cutting through the dead air. In a single moment we are now both criminals, fugitives, hunted men. The victim of my crime is hitting rigor mortis right about now. The victim of his could be me. He could take my heavy heart and sobbing eyes and smash them into a wall. He could end every thought and regret swirling in my head and throw them over a bridge.
I am ringing the cord above me maniacally. I am jabbing it down.
"Stop requested. Stop requested. Stop requested," a digital voice announces.
I am twitching. I am wondering if everything I see whipping by the window will be the last image I have of this world. Dairy Queen. Sally's Beauty Supply. Wells Fargo. A man sleeping against the side of a dumpster while a dog rummages through his plastic bags. I wonder if I am being punished, my sentence being carried out by a spastic headbanger. Is my execution destined to be the crashing, burning kind? Will my charred and mangled flesh be considered martyr material or will I be viewed as a despicable villain who slayed his paternal grandfather? Will they lock me out at the gates of heaven, pointing to the hands I used to snuff a life? Is this Kiss freak a good friend of my pa-pa who is taking his kamikaze revenge?
The bus stops and the doors ease open. This is not my stop. This is more than eight miles away from my stop but I jump out. This is a street lacking light. There could be monsters hiding, demons waiting, but I exit hastily.
A sickly-thin man with glasses is at the stop. His ash-colored clothes hang off him, his face is sunken and bloodless. His fingers appear the right length for scraping one's way out of a coffin. If he wishes to play among us, the undead, the depraved, the killers and thieves, he certainly looks the part.
He sticks his head in the bus.
"Do you go to Briarforest?"
Before the interim driver blasts off into the night, before he tears the skin of the tires and jets on with his ride of lunacy, he answers the man.
"Kiss friggin' rocks!"